Digging and scratching

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

In a recent edition of his excellent newsletter companion to his book, The Art of Noticing, my friend Rob Walker wrote about the spirit of DJs digging through record crates featured in the documentary Scratch:

You have to spend the time to sort through the junk to find the treasure. There is no shortcut…. I like to try to apply this spirit of crate-digging to everyday life. The only way to find the good stuff, the special stuff, the genuine moments and the true inspiration, is to first engage with the everyday, the mundane, the seemingly useless, the things nobody else seems to care about. So engage. There is no shortcut; there is no algorithm. If all you do is track what’s trending, then all you’ll ever know is exactly what everyone else already knew. To discover, you have to dig.

https://youtu.be/4I3CovIKJWE

I was reminded of chapter six of Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, entitled, appropriately enough, “Scratching”:

You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something. It’s like clawing the side of a mountain to get a toehold, a grip, some sort of traction to keep moving upward and onward….. Scratching can look like borrowing or appropriating, but it’s an essential part of creativity. It’s primal, and very private. It’s a way of saying to the gods, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just wander around in these back hallways…” and then grabbing that piece of fire and running like hell.

(Emphasis mine.)

Discovering the masterpiece right in front of you

Monday, September 30, 2019

While reading Alan Jacobs’ newsletter, I came across the story of a woman in her 90s who’d kept a painting above her hotplate that turned out to be a Cimabue worth six million bucks. (Cimabue was born in Florence in 1240. Vasari tells a story that he found Giotto drawing sheep from his flock on a rock and asked if he’d like to be his apprentice. )

I admit it’s not as exciting, but I also recently discovered a masterpiece hanging in my house. My wife and I bought this poster at a Botticelli show in Florence in 2004. We call her “The Botticelli Woman,” and she guards our front door:

In the 15 years that she’s hung in our entryways, I’ve never actually bothered to look up what painting she’s from. Then I was flipping through a book of Botticelli paintings at the thrift store and saw Pallas and the Centaur:

She’s always had a calming effect on me, and yet, I always had the feeling she should be guarding the place. Well, turns out my intuition was correct: That poster is a helluva crop! “The halberd,” that crazy axe-looking thing she’s holding, “was a weapon carried by guards rather than on the battlefield.”

How many things do we keep around our house whose histories we know nothing about?

More block printing

Sunday, September 29, 2019

The boys and I sat around the kitchen table this weekend and made some more block prints.

The four-year-old is still too little to do his own carving, so I had him draw on the block and I carved it for him. (His is the skeleton on the right, the others are by the six-year-old.)

Drawings have the right to exist

Friday, September 27, 2019

Lynda Barry, who we’ve all known was a genius, but is now officially one, posted these images on Instagram from “The Night We All Got Sick,” the first comic in The Greatest of Marlys, with the following caption:

These are the first drawings of Marlys. I didn’t know who she was or that I was about to spend the next 30 years with her. I was just making a comic strip about cousins getting sick after a parade. I didnt know who any of them where when they first showed up that day. And I was on the fence about them, wondering should I keep this drawing or not? It scares me to think how easily I could have thrown her away on this first day because I didn’t like the way she “looked”, because the drawing didn’t please me. I believe drawings have the same right to exist as I do. I’m so glad I kept the drawing. I’m so glad I didn’t throw her out.

“I believe Maryls conjures me as much as I conjure her,” Lynda writes in the book’s introduction. “The portable between her world and mine is a pen line made by the living mystery of this hand, this hand that looks like yours.”

We create our drawings and they create us.